The present invention relates to the field of electronic communications and, more particularly, to the intelligent automatic expansion/contraction of abbreviations in text-based electronic communications.
Text-based electronic communications (e.g., emails, instant messages, text messages, social network postings, etc.) have become a key part of many aspects of daily life—home, office, social, and community. These electronic communications often include a variety of abbreviations, including acronyms, initialisms, and shortened word formats. In fact, a whole set of abbreviations have been developed to reduce the number of key strokes when writing text and/or instant messages. For example, a person can type “LOL” to abbreviate the phrase “Laugh Out Loud”.
Abbreviations are also commonplace in technical and/or military environments. Often times, the same abbreviation means different things in different contexts and/or environments. For example, the acronym “RSS”, an information technology (IT) setting, is able to stand for Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication, Recording and Streaming Server, as well as other definitions. In a military setting, RSS stands for Regimental Support Squadron, Rescue Swimmer School, Radar Support System, and others. These multiple meanings severely reduce the communication efficiency originally provided by using abbreviations.
Approaches have been developed to address the issue of multiple meanings by automatically expanding or contracting abbreviations in text-based communications based upon context. While such an approach is helpful to some degree, ambiguous abbreviations are still problematic, especially when multiple definitions of an abbreviation are applicable to the context. These tools and approaches disregard the sender's and/or recipient's prior usage of the abbreviation to guide usage.
Further, these approaches assume that all viewers or recipients of the communication wish to view the text in the same manner. Individualized presentation of abbreviations is unavailable. That is, using such an approach, a recipient who prefers to have expanded abbreviations contracted (e.g., prefers to see “on my way” as “omw”) is unable to have their communications presented as such.